Musicians love to talk about music riots, probably because they make us feel dangerous and relevant. According to composer George Benjamin, Olivier Messiaen was delighted when an audience member hit him on the head with an umbrella after a premiere because it “made him feel young again”. It’s no wonder that the riot that is supposed to have taken place at the premiere of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring is such a favourite; it dramatically frames the Ballet as the opening salvo in modernism’s assault on tradition. My personal suspicion is that stories we tell about music riots over-inflate music’s capacity to viscerally shock “unprepared audiences.” In my experience, when people find that something isn’t to their liking, they simply tune it out. How do I reconcile this with historical events like Woodstock 99, the Dixie chicks (now the Chicks), Disco demolition night, or the Satanic Panic?

My hypothesis is that music panics are always about much more than just the music. Intentionally or not, the stage for a riot has already been set by a myriad of other factors. In the case of the premiere of the Rite of Spring, we know that the audience was primed to be outraged. It was given on an unusually hot night, which tends to make crowds more restless. Stravinsky by this time already had a reputation for taking ballet in a radical direction, and his Rite of Spring had been promoted as such by impresario Sergei Diaghilev. This probably drew an audience composed of radical and anti-radical factions ready to make their opinions heard. The choreography, every bit as primal and harsh as the music, was at least as controversial. The “riot” also happened in the context of a larger discussion around the rapid transformation of social norms and relations. It hadn’t even been a decade since the end of the Dreyfuss Affair, a bitter political scandal which split the Republic into deeply hostile camps over the course of 12 years. It’s easy to see how the audience of the champs-elysées could have been divided between the open-minded, liberal intelligentsia and conservative, old-world reactionaries. While the music was an element of this struggle, it was standing in for a much larger debate.

Similarly, Disco Demolition Night was a literal explosion of anger that points to a much broader phenomenon. In 1979, Disco was at an untenable saturation point that sparked the resentment of old-school hard rock fans. That year the White Sox decided to invite anti-Disco crusader Steve Dahl to the pitch to blow up a crateful of Disco vinyls as a promotional event. It drew a crowd of over 50,000 of rock fans who, after the explosion, rushed onto the pitch chanting “disco sucks.” The success of the event can be attributed, at least in part, to the resentment many held toward disco for its roots in gay, black, and latine culture. While John Travolta had helped Disco “come out of the closet,” straight white males were still likely to interpret it as a threat to their status and as a front in a cultural and demographic war . In many ways Disco Demolition Night is emblematic of the death of the post-war New Deal consensus in 1979, when millions of working-class whites became disillusioned with the myth of progress and voted for Ronald Reagan. It would not be accurate, however, to say that anti-Disco sentiment opened the way for neoliberalism.

Grand narratives about art flatter artists who want to believe that their work has the power to dramatically change the world, but we should be humble about art’s power. The simple fact is that people are driven much more by ideology and material circumstances. Kurt Vonnegut (peace be upon him) notes that “During the Vietnam War, every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.”

Sources:
Anderson, Mark W. (July 11, 2014). “Time Obscures Meaning of Disco Demolition: Saturday is the 35th Anniversary of the infamous Disco Demolition Night”
BBC’s 50 Modern classics, Chronochromie https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02r9r0n)
Frank, Gillian (May 2007). “Discophobia: Antigay Prejudice and the 1979 Backlash against Disco”. Journal of the History of Sexuality
Zeitz, J. (October 2008). “Rejecting the center: Radical grassroots politics in the 1970s—second-wave feminism as a case study”
Listening to Music (West Publications, St. Paul, 1992), 419 pp; 2nd edition (West Publications, St. Paul, 1996), 435 pp; 3rd edition (Wadsworth, 2000), 451 pp.; 5th edition (Wadsworth, 2007), 451 pp.; 7th edition (Schirmer-Cengage, 2014, 488 pp.; 8th edition (Cengage Learning, 2017).